The Plextor M3

Plextor sent us a 256GB model of their M3 series. Below is a table containing the specifications of their M3 line.

Plextor M3 Specifications

Model

PX-64M3

PX-128M3

PX-256M3

PX-512M3

Raw NAND Capacity

64GiB

128GiB

256GiB

512GiB

Formatted Capacity

59.6GiB

119.2GiB

238.5GiB

476.9GiB

Number of NAND Packages

8

8

8

8

Number of die per Package

1

2

4

8

Sequential Read

520MB/s

510MB/s

510MB/s

525MB/s

Sequential Write

175MB/s

210MB/s

360MB/s

445MB/s

4K Random Read

55K IOPS

70K IOPS

70K IOPS

56K IOPS

4K Random Write

40K IOPS

50K IOPS

65K IOPS

30K IOPS

Cache (DDR3)

128MB

256MB

512MB

512MB

The Plextor M3 is available in all the standard capacities. In the light of the performance specifications, the M3 looks very promising. It beats its closest match, the Crucial m4, in all aspects. It's very competitive even with SandForce based SSDs and especially the stated random read figures are great.

NewEgg Price Comparison (4/2/2012)

64GB

128GB

256GB

512GB

Plextor M3

$110

$180

$340

$660

Crucial m4

$88

$155

$315

$630

Intel 520 Series

$110

$180

$345

$800

Samsung 830 Series

$105

$185

$300

$780

OCZ Vertex 3

$90

$178

$340

$770

Price wise the M3 is not the cheapest SSD, especially in the smaller capacities. There is about $10-15 premium in the 64GB and 128GB models but 256GB and 512GB models are more competitively priced. Crucial's m4, however, comes in as a cheaper option than the M3 at every capacity so that will be a key matchup where Plextor has to win on performance or come down in pricing.

The external design of Plextor M3 is very solid. When I first saw it, it reminded me of Samsung 830 with its brushed metal finish. Only the Plextor logo has been printed on the front—The model and other important information are printed on a sticker on the back of the drive. The drive package includes a 3.5" bracket, quick installation guide, and a software CD, which includes a clone&backup utility along with performance analyzer. Plextor is giving the M3 a top notch 5-year warranty as well.

Each of the main components (controller, NAND devices, and DRAM) have their own little thermal pad. Since the chassis is also made out of metal, heat dissipation should not be a problem.

Inside we find Marvell’s 88SS9174-BLD2 controller (or just 9174). This is the same controller that's in Crucial's m4, but the firmware is custom developed by Plextor. It’s actually a bit surprising, yet very refreshing, to see a Marvell based SSD for a change. Everyone seems to have a SandForce solution these days. We have seen that Marvell can be competitive; you just need to take the time to customize the firmware to get good performance. The stock SandForce firmware is fast enough, so it's obvious that many companies choose to go with the easiest option.

Flip the PCB and we find eight Toshiba 24nm 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND devices. That’s coupled with two 256MB DDR-1333 chips from Nanya, giving a total of 512MB of DDR3 cache.

Toshiba uses a Toggle-Mode interface and the current iteration (2.0) of Toggle-Mode NAND is good for up to 400MT/s per interface. Rating speed by transfers is a bit annoying as it doesn't tell us the actual bandwidth—for that we need the width of the channel and transfers per second. The channel in this case is 8 bits wide, so that works out to be 3.2Gbps per interface, or 400MB/s. With eight NAND packages, the maximum throughput works out to be 3200MB/s, over four times more than what SATA 6Gb/s can provide. Of course, reading from NAND and dumping the data into a register is one thing; it's another matter to actually transfer the data to a host controller over the interface.

We want to provide a quick word about firmware updates before we go into benchmarks. The drive came with FW 1.01, which was the latest at that time. Plextor has recently released FW 1.02 which is supposed to fix some issues but all our tests have been done using FW 1.01. Plextor is not claiming increased performance in the release notes of the update. The actual process of updating the firmware is very simple. Download a small ISO (~3MB) from Plextor's site, burn that to a CD or USB stick and boot from that. Press Enter and it automatically flashes the drive. I even had all my other drives plugged in and there was no problem.

Our regular readers may notice that my testbed is not exactly the same as Anand's. Anand's setup is based on Intel's motherboard with H67 chipset, whereas mine is an ASRock board based on Intel's Z68 chipset. The important bit here is that both feature native SATA 6Gb/s support and both setups use the same drivers. Other features and components don't really have an effect on SSD testing. For example the average CPU usage during write speed tests is less than 5%.

Kristian, Thanks for the clarification. One further question, in the Intel 520 review, the performance of Sandforce based SSD after TRIM cannot recover to clean state. Isn't this something of concern? The M3 can recovery its clean state performance either via GC or TRIM but this is not possible with Sandforce based SSD. Would this count as one strength on M3's Truespeed implementation?Reply

It's mentioned that the Razor Blade had a Lite-On SSD. Lite-on and Philips "owns" the Plextor-brandname when it comes to this types of products - under the PLDS-name - see /www.pldsnet.com. The Lite-On SSDs are the same as the Plextor SSDs. So it's more that Plextor is a high-end marketing-name for Lite-On?

Plextors M3P should be reviewed. Great SSD. Fastest of the Marvell-based SSD it seems...Reply